Half- Life 2 Stutter Solved
As a followup to the story on Saturday about the HL2 stutter bug, Voodoo Extreme has news that a patch is on the way, with an ETA of tomorrow. "A patch will be coming for this issue that will load all of the required textures into video memory on level load, rather than doing it during game play."
Will make the loading times even longer? Great!
Now the level load times will be longer. More important, someone explain why there's any video memory to spare? I'm presuming the main point was to free up space and swap textures out when entering a new area that didn't need those anymore. If all level textures are loaded at once, some aren't going to fit, right?
If its only intermittent and only for a few seconds, you might have the auto-save stutter. The game has auto save points sprinkled about rather liberally that are the only cause of quite a few peoples' stutter. I don't know what part of suddenly writting out 8 megs to disk in the middle of gameplay seemed like a good idea at the time, with no way of turning it off.
I'm worried that even after this fix, that problem might still remain.